Month: October 2018

GraphQL Finland 2018 conference was held last week (18-19.10.2018) at Paasitorni and the first of its kind event in Finland brought a day of workshops and a day of talks around GraphQL. The event was organized by the same people as React Finland and it showed, in good ways. The talks were interesting, venue was appropriate, atmosphere was cosy and after party was bookie. Here’s my notes from the event.

All of the talks were live streamed and they’re available on Youtube. I was lucky to get a ticket to the event and be able to enjoy the talks live. In overall most of talks were easy to comprehend although I only had some experience with GraphQL through experiments and what I had learnt couple of months ago at React Finland 2018 conference (my notes from day 1 and day 2).

“GraphQL is an open source data query and manipulation language, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. It was developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being publicly released in 2015. It provides a more efficient, powerful and flexible alternative to REST and ad-hoc web service architectures. It allows clients to define the structure of the data required, and exactly the same structure of the data is returned from the server, therefore preventing excessively large amounts of data from being returned. – Wikipedia“

Notes from the talks

(titles are links on Youtube to particular talk)

Adopting GraphQL in Large Codebases – Adam Miskiewicz
The event started with Adam Miskiewicz’s story from Airbnb and incrementally adopting GraphQL. It’s simple to start using GraphQL in your project but adding it incrementally and carefully in huge codebases powering large distributed systems is not quite as straightforward. The talk dived into how Airbnb is tackling this challenge, what they’ve learned so far, and how they plan to continue evolving their GraphQL infrastructure in the future. Towards GraphQL Native!

Going offline first with GraphQL — Kadi KramanKadi Kraman from Formidable Labs talked about going offline first with GraphQL. She did a nice interactive demo with React Native and Apollo 2. Users expect your mobile app to work offline and the tooling in GraphQL makes it reasonably straightforward to get your React Native app working offline. Slides

Life is hard and so is learning GraphQL — Carolyn Stransky
Life is hard, without documentation. Carolyn Stransky presented her story of ups and downs when learning GraphQL and documentation’s role in it. The problem with GraphQL is that – because there’s no “vanilla” GraphQL – there’s no central hub for all of the information and tooling necessary to learn. It’s underutilized and scattered throughout our community. The talk touched on how to better enable GraphQL docs for learning and comprehension and slides pointed to good resources.

Talks from the deep end

Some of the GraphQL Finland talks were quite deep in the content and as most of the talks were around 15 minutes, the pace was quite demanding. At the event I concentrated on topics which seemed most relevant and saved the rest for later. The sponsor’s lounge by Gofore and Digia provided nice relaxing space to get your thoughts together. Here are the topics I saved for later.

All work no play (photo: Juho Vepsäläinen)Makes you a dull boy (photo: Juho Vepsäläinen)

End-to-end type-safety with GraphQL — Johannes Schickling
Talk dived deep into one of the most powerful features of GraphQL – its type-system. GraphQL can be used to enable end-to-end type-safety across any language, making your application architecture more resilient and easier to evolve.

Reason and GraphQL — Nik Graf
Using Reason’s type inference you can create GraphQL servers with 100% type coverage. And Reason shines even more so on the client. Send one quick introspection request and you get full autocompletion on your schema right in the browser.